These colder winter days make everything harder. My barn chores take twice as long; I have to dress up in heavy warm clothes that I hate, scarf, hat, gloves, and snow boots; the hay is harder to unwrap from the bale, the wind whips all the particles back into your face as you pitch it, the ice and snow make it difficult to carry grain to each paddock; and the water needs checked often to make sure it’s not frozen, etc….I could go on complaining, but my point is that I would rather stay indoors where it’s warm than go out and feed my horses.
There’s a verse in the Bible though, that pretty well sums up how I truly feel about the subject, and it’s found at I Thessalonians 3:10, where the last part of the verse says, “This we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” This principle is plain and clear to me: if I’m too lazy or tired or cold to go out and make sure that my horses have feed and water, then I myself should not be allowed to eat or drink.
And that’s pretty much what happened to a woman from the Houston, Texas area, when she was convicted of starving her two horses. A judge ordered her to spend her first three days in jail with nothing but bread and water, and also had enlarged images of her horses in their poor condition posted around her cell to remind her of what she did to them. Prosecutors claimed she left her horses without food and proper veterinarian care for four months because she was simply too lazy to feed them. Though she only spent 30 days in jail, one of the horses had to be put down, and the other one was adopted. So she got a much better deal than her horses did. You can read the news story here.
I kind of like that judge’s way of thinking, though. I think the golden rule applies to animals, too–always treat them the way you would like to be treated. If this sort of thing happened a little more often, maybe we’d see less abuse and neglect cases. Can you imagine if the judge who sentenced a well-known football player to several months in prison and a ban from owning a dog for the next three years had instead given him the sentence of being hung, shot at, or thrown into a ring of fighting grizzly bears? If the sentence matched the crime, there would be a lot less animal abuse.
The Bible verse, the bread and water sentence, and the threat of jail is not what keeps me doing my chores, though. I love my horses, and if something happened to one of them, I’d feel as wounded as if it had happened to a family member. Their well-being is pretty high on my list of priorities, and it makes me happy to see them eating happily in spite of the winter’s edge.
The really nice part about it all is that my sweet husband does a lot of the chores for me, since he’s out feeding his calves anyway. So even though they’re actually my horses, a lot of their care falls to him, including buying all the hay. Which helps me forget all about complaining about winter and focus more on the wonderful life I have, with a really good man who cares enough about me to care a whole lot about my horses. I love him.
